> except for having to edit at a lot of randomly-chosen cursor points far apart from each other (but how often is that your use case?)

I use Sublime, and pretty often I do a "Find All" for some term; then Multiselect (Cmd+L); then select from cursor (Shift+RightArrow); and then type something. Which is essentially "editing at a lot of randomly [or at least arbitrarily]-chosen cursor points."

That, and IIRC Sublime actually does its "Find and Replace All" operation, as essentially this same multicursor-select-and-type operation internally. (If you have a large-enough buffer open, you can see it gradually doing it!)